2013 SIAA Conference: Is impact measurement the highway to hell?

The annual conference of the Social Impact Analyst Association (SIAA) took place in Paris on 10 December. SIAA was founded in 2011 to ‘build an active international community of social impact analysts’. The conference theme, which attracted over 100 participants, was ‘Beyond Measurement’: Analysts should not measure impact for its own sake but integrate it in a larger process, so that organizations can improve their work.

That being said, it makes sense to go beyond sheer impact measurement, but the real question is: how do we define ‘beyond’? Where does impact measurement take us? According to various points of view, it could be heaven or hell.

The goal is not to say which tool is the best, because the answer depends on the strategy defined by the supported organization and the donor.

However, there is a trend that can take us from that hell to a paradise in which organizations define a strategy that is revised after their results are measured (as opposed to a recent NPC study showing that 80 per cent of charities do not use any planning models; a paradise where donors use not only their heart but also their head when they engage in philanthropy (only 2 per cent do so according to another NPC study).

The road to this paradise is not a highway. At this stage, it looks more like a path, and it has to be approached from a global and pragmatic perspective. Impact measurement is not an end in itself but the end of a process that begins with planning one’s philanthropic commitment.